


World Falling Apart

by arielchan



Category: Mighty Boosh (TV), Mighty Boosh RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 18:57:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arielchan/pseuds/arielchan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In another world, Noel and Julian meet for the first time outside one of Julian's gigs. Nothing else is really the same. Contains lots of references to older Boosh jokes and stand-up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Falling Apart

The first couple times Julian had seen Noel hanging around after a gig, he’d ignored him almost methodically. After all, if a creature like that was hanging around shit comedy venues, he had to be looking for someone in particular. Since Julian was positive he’d never seen the kid before, he knew there was no way he was the someone.

But the third night, Noel spoke to him.

It so completely defied all basic sense that Julian missed the first two minutes of the conversation, which in this case was a lot. The kid talked fast. Super-sonic comedy indeed, and Julian would be laughing about it later - much later.

At the moment, however, Julian was just trying to get his mouth to catch up with his brain. “I’m sorry,” he sputtered. “What were you saying?”

“I like your act,” said the kid with the backwards hair. “I’ve come a few times, and I always giggle like a maniac. I’m Noel, by the way.”

Noel. Julian didn’t remember ever meeting anyone called Noel, and surely he’d remember this one. It defied logic. He couldn’t think of anything in the news for this area, either, nothing that would bring Noel here much less make him latch onto him.

“I do comedy too,” Noel was saying, oblivious to Julian’s deep thoughts. “It’s a bit like yours, really, a bit weird.”

“Oh.”

“I started a bit shit, but I’m getting a lot better. Maybe we’ll get on a bill together or something someday soon.”

“I doubt it,” Julian said, grinding out his cigarette against the bricks. When Noel’s face fell, something in his stomach plummeted too, and he muffled the blow. “Maybe. See you next week?” Noel nodded quickly and Julian felt a twinge of regret. Not fucking likely.

But Noel was there the next week, and the week after that, and each time it was exactly the same - Julian would step out for a fag and chat uncomfortably to the couple folks who came to talk to him for a few minutes, then, when they’d cleared off, Noel would appear.

Julian should probably have been ignoring him still, but the kid was infectious. He actually did make Julian laugh, although it remained muffled and guilty, joy taken in a back alley like he was dealing drugs instead of jokes.

It was over a month before he asked Julian to take him home.

By that point, Julian wasn’t expecting it. It had taken so long, he thought maybe Noel was just a bit weird and, while Julian might be a passing fancy he got caught up in, the kid really was waiting for someone else.

So when he finally asked, Julian was caught totally off guard after yet another night of slow swigs of beer, cigarettes, and infectious giggles in the alley. The question made his stomach drop again (Noel seemed to have that effect), made him choke on his beer and ask the kid to repeat himself once more.

“Get your hearing checked,” Noel laughed. “I think there’s a small colony of dwarves living in your canals, banging away on your ear drums and building little cottages out of wax. I said, I think my mates ran off without me. Could you give me a lift back to mine?”

Julian might have panicked a bit, although he wouldn’t have admitted it, and in his panic he blurted out, as one does, the first words that leapt into his mouth, which as it happened were, “How about mine instead?”

For a moment, Noel looked almost as flummoxed as Julian had been, but then his face smoothed over. “Well, alright,” he said coolly. “I suppose i can take the train in the morning. My mates won’t even notice, and I’m bloody knackered. I’d probably carry on sleeping if you drove me to the Arctic.”

“I doubt it, sir. The arctic is a very dangerous environment for a young, fancy man of the city like yourself. What would you do if a polar bear came on you while you slumbered?”

“I don’t know,” Noel said cheekily, gesturing to the parked car. “I imagine we’d probably just get on.”

“You don’t ‘just get on’ with a polar bear! They’re vicious killers.”

“Get on or get off,” Noel grinned at Julian’s look of disgust. “You’re the one who suggested he was going to come on me while I slept.”

For once Julian was truly glad the kid talked so much, or the drive would have been nothing but silence and the faint sound of Julian’s busted radio, humming away. As they were pulling up to Julian’s building, Noel was finishing up a story he’d only half heard involving someone (possibly a younger brother?), a shopping trolley, and a couple of dead fish. “And that,” Noel was saying as Julian cut the engine, “is why I wasn’t allowed in my aunt’s house for over a year.”

When they walked up the steps, Julian still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing with the kid here. Noel had actually made it here, for one thing, when part of Julian still thought he wouldn’t, that Julian wasn’t really who he was waiting around for, but now that Noel was standing behind him, watching him fumble the key in the lock, reality was creeping in.  
In fact, when the door shut behind them, reality slammed home harder than the wall Julian was pushed back into. His hands came up automatically to grasp the thin hips, then slid away, dropped as he opened his mouth, sliding his lips over Noel’s meeting his tongue briefly before his hands came back up, deliberate this time, and pushed Noel gently back.

Noel wasn’t panting of course, but in the dark hall he somehow gave the illusion of being flushed. “Right,” Noel said. “What’s wrong? I thought-”

“No. I can’t.”

“Right.”

“I mean, I shouldn’t,” Julian corrected, his fingers throwing his already mussed hair into further disarray.

“Look,” Noel said urgently. “I don’t normally either. I mean, not seriously. I just thought there was something...”

“No, you’re right, it’s just... there’s a line.” Julian was sagging into the wall now. Noel was still standing too close, much too close, and his blood was humming desperately. “There’s a line and I can’t cross it, but I want to, I do, but I don’t even know where it is.”

“Okay.” Noel grinned in a way that surely precipitated trouble. “But does the line keep us from a little cuddle?”

With a shy smile, Julian reached for Noel’s hand and moved him toward the bedroom.

Noel was gone the next morning, without any obvious sign he’d been in Julian’s flat at all. Julian had known it would probably happen, and he stamped down on the irrational part of his brain that was hurt by the sight of morning sunlight streaming across the empty pillow.

He wondered if the invitation home had opened up a whole new pathway. That night, would he crack his front door and find Noel mock-shivering on the stoop? But no, it didn’t work that way, and Julian was left trudging through a very long week.

The gig was bad. The moment Julian stepped up to the microphone, he saw Noel seated at an empty table in the back of the room and all he could think of was the smooth slide of Noel’s hand down his side, the way his heart had shifted into his throat when Noel had asked for a ride home, the way part of Julian wanted nothing more than to meld the two of them into one beast, and underneath that how wrong the whole scenario was, how weird.

Afterward, Julian practically clung to the one audience member who gave him the time of day. He knew it made him seem even more awkward, hungry for accolades no matter how mediocre, but still he postponed the inevitable until the man, not even bothering with excuses, slipped away, and Noel appeared out of the shadows.

“Cheers, Ju,” Noel said with his usual lopsided grin. “Off night tonight, eh? Something else on your mind?”

Julia absolutely did not blush. “Everyone has one on occasion, even the great men.”

Noel propped himself against the bricks next to Julian. “You giving me another ride home tonight?”

“To mine?”

“No. I’ve got plans. I really need to get back home tonight.”

“It can’t wait?” There was an edge of pleading in Julian’s voice, but Noel was shaking his head before he even opened his mouth.

“You know it can’t, Julian.”

Julian had never suspected that Noel knew. He’d assumed the kid was just one of those too caught up in living to stop and be self-aware, but there was so much more to Noel that the surface, and of course he knew. He’d known all along.

Without a word, Julian turned and walked to his car, and Noel followed. They drove in silence this time, no chatter, only the occasional direction from Noel to turn here or there. Julian wondered where they would stop - a shabby university flat? A well-kept house with parents waiting inside? A bridge, perhaps?

“Here,” Noel said suddenly. “Here is fine.”

Out the window, rows of squat shapes cast long shadows under the street lights. Julian felt like a child again, fearful of darkness and quiet graves.

“Why me,” Julian asked, abruptly desperate to know before he was too late. “I never knew you.”

“I know,” Noel said. “Bit odd, isn’t it? But I feel you should have. you should have known me so well. We’re a missed opportunity, you and I.

“Somewhere in another world, we’re on that bill together. We’re writing an act, all our own- Barratt and Fielding! Or maybe not that, that’s a bit rubbish. Some other life, we know each other so well we fit inside each other’s skin without even trying, and we grow up, and we grow old together.”

“What about this world?” Julian asked. “What am I supposed to do here, alone?

Noel’s hand was suddenly on Julian’s arm, his chipped black fingernails digging in urgently. “Here, you’ll do it. You’re brilliant. You’ll do it all on your own. You just need a bit more confidence.”

Julian grabbed Noel’s hand in his free one and pulled him over, across the shifter, into a fierce, biting kiss until Noel pulled back, eyes burning blue in the shadows. “I have to go,” he said. “Remember, Julian, you can do it all on your own. And I’ll be waiting for you when you’re done.”

And with that, the door opened and Noel was gone. Julian stared out the window at the shapes in the darkness, rows and rows of uniform stones, and wondered which stone stood apart from the others, which stone belonged to Noel. He drove away.

The rest of that week, Julian tried nothing more than to blank his mind however he could. He spent time with friends. He went out. He got drunk. He pulled women almost every night. They were drawn to him suddenly, maybe sensing a hurt they wanted instinctively to heal. It was nothing to Julian, just a way to waste time before gig night came around again.

He slept most of the day, hungover. An hour before he needed to be there, he staggered out of bed to make a coffee. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face. Finger-combing his hair into something less of a disaster, something by the sink caught his eye.

It was a pencil, an eyeliner pencil, black. Most likely it was left behind by one of the girls earlier in the week, in a rush to freshen her face and toss things in her purse before leaving in her clothes from the night before.

Without thinking about why, he uncapped the pencil. The line, just a thin curve under each eye, was easy to make. He didn’t look that different, but he felt better somehow, and when he got to the gig he stepped on stage wearing Noel like a totem.

After raising a few faint laughs with his usual joke about seeing other audiences, he paused for a moment, and a light came on in his mind. “Look at you,” he said. “You’ve got a face. I’ve got a face. It’s all going to be alright.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first completed Boosh-related fic. I'm sorry if it's a bit morbid. Yes, Noel is dead and a ghost the whole story.
> 
> Basically in this universe, it's not uncommon for ghosts to show up and ask friends or loved ones to take them somewhere and give them closure so they can move on. Noel and Julian didn't meet before Noel died (and you can decide for yourself what happened to him) but the pull between them was so strong that Noel found him even after death. Only Julian can see him, and only Julian can touch him.
> 
> In the end, having met Noel, Julian is a stronger person, and like Noel predicted this version of Julian will go on to be just as successful, and will learn how to handle it all himself, because he'll have a little bit of Noel in him now.


End file.
